// permission to reproduce not received. though at 85k, much
// of it footnotes, the intro and section info should give a sense
// of its contents. without the checks and balances of 'strategic
// studies', does that leave everyone with the open-source intel
// of newstreams and availability to specialized information, so
// that one becomes one's own Stratfor, strategic forecaster, and
// if so, what does it mean when (for lack of information, possibly)
// that the world 'says no' to war or G.W.Bush, do they have better
// intel on the world order in the next 10-20 years, or is that not the
// point? without checks and balances on the issues of the day, one
// is left to make up one's own mind- where's accurate information?
// maybe there is a strategic re-alignment underway, undersway, in
// which things may be reordered, one way or another. inevitable.
// maybe it would be the difference between keeping the status quo
// content, and changing little or nothing, or also risking total collapse
// so as to enable total change. whatever it is, it seems that the U.S.
// is now set back 30+ years in its development, if not more. but, what
// is the chance that previous administrations, by keeping things as
// they are, may not have set things even further back, to a breaking
// point. meaning- why is Bill Clinton lauding Bono on the verge of
// WWIII? what if, strategy-wise, a global re-alignment may avert even
// greater catastrophe between global states now seeking the pole-
// position as the U.S. seems bent on fulfilling a type of obligation to
// prove its power through force, a move fatal for many of the states
// playing in the background, setting up best-exploitation scenarios?
// when lack of strategic information makes 'war or no war' an actual
// choice, as if scratching off a lotto ticket, like 'terrorism or no
terrorism',
// what information is this being based on, and for what ends, and for
// what price? price, meaning, death, incendiary political economics.
// whois to blame- that's easy- the U.S. administration, by holding back
// all information, even the most benign reasoning for strategic moves
// and dealings, is playing a winner-take-all game, and who will ever
// know who wins or loses, if no one ever knows what game is played?
// maybe an attempt is being made, say, to break OPEC, to shift the
// oil power to non-OPEC countries, to separate forms of government
// from oil-supplies (that is, extremist governments, possibly), and to
// enable the domino-effect of transforming the Middle East. unlikely-
// maybe, but not impossible. is it worth dying for today, going to war
// even on a civilian front? well, maybe it depends on whether one
// wants a working computer should radical disruptions occur in the
// global energy (communications, and transportation) order. what if,
// beyond U.S. President George W. Bush, there is reason to pursue
// current policies, no matter how dangerous they may seem or really
// are- to avert a greater catastrophic future, played out strategically?
// maybe no one really knows. that is what scares me. maybe the U.S.
// government, not the administration, but the whole of the bureaucracy
// does not know one way or the other, for better or for worse, because
// of all the secrecy, there is no distance, no choice. it is just 'for war',
// then, those 'against war' would provide the needed counterweight.
// though, one might be skeptical. people are dying for some reason.
Should Strategic Studies Survive?
Richard K. Betts *
http://www.dean.usma.edu/socs/ECON/ens/betts.html
A specter is haunting strategic studies--the specter of peace. This
sounds odd so long after the burst of euphoria at the end of the cold
war, which dissipated into so many nasty little wars. Political
science, however, has been less interested in war per se than in
cataclysmic war among great powers, war that can visit not just
benighted people far away, but people like us. Half a century of world
war and cold war provided that impetus for strategic studies. After the
cold war, however, universities face other demands as resources shrink.
Has the warrant for feeding this field expired? Certainly not.
First, one interest alone fully justifies keeping the flame burning: to
have expertise on the shelf in case great-power conflict arises again,
which is more likely to happen than not. For whatever reason, the
United States finds itself in a war or crisis in almost every
generation.
Second, confusion continues about what U.S. foreign policy should
expect military power to do for less vital interests. What force can
accomplish in a specific situation does not follow directly from
standard international relations theories or rational choice models;
the answer depends on military technology, organization, and doctrine,
and how they fit with local political and geographic circumstances.
After the cold war, liberals, on the one hand, who spent the last
thirty years trying to reduce American military power, demanded that
Washington "do something" with the armed forces to suppress atrocities,
promote democracy, and keep peace in places like Bosnia, Somalia, and
Haiti. Conservatives, on the other hand, insisted on buying hefty
forces but not using them. Vague notions that military power can impose
political solutions at a reasonable cost, or that outside military
power is useless for doing so, were subjected to little analytical
discipline after 1990. If capacity for informed strategic
analysis--integrating political, economic, [End Page 7] and military
judgment--is not preserved and applied, decisions on the use of force
will be uninformed and, therefore, irresponsible.
Third, the size and composition of the U.S. defense budget are crucial,
affecting fiscal and social policy as well as foreign affairs. Who can
rationally recommend whether the budget should be higher or lower, or
what it should buy, without any expertise on the nature of military
forces and what combinations of them are necessary to achieve
objectives set by elected officials? If civilian strategists are not to
decide along with the professional military, either ignorant civilians
will do it, disjoining political and military logic, or the military
will do it alone.
Fourth, U.S. civil-military relations are problematic. The armed forces
were reformed and rejuvenated over the same time that political
leadership loosened oversight. Reagan's romantic nationalism made for
laissez-faire civilian control, and Clinton's impaired moral authority,
owing to his own draft evasion, precluded vigorous guidance as
commander in chief. After Vietnam, the military became more popular
with the mass public as the elite distanced itself from it. Fewer
civilian policymakers have experienced military service themselves,
while the military institution as it shrinks is growing apart from
society after a half century of closeness enforced by the mass
mobilization of world war and cold war. There is no danger of direct
insubordination, but a larger proportion of military officers now feels
more competent and more moral than the rest of their country and less
respectful of their government. Education in strategy will not solve
problems in civil-military relations and might even aggravate conflict
if it emboldens civilians to question military judgments. But if checks
and balances matter, it can only help.
Strategic studies is both necessary and contested because it focuses on
the essential Clausewitzian problem: how to make force a rational
instrument of policy rather than mindless murder--how to integrate
politics and war. This requires the interdisciplinary joining of
military grammar and political logic, in Clausewitz's terms, a marriage
that gets lip service in principle but is often subverted in practice
by those who identify more with one half of the union than the other.
Soldiers often object to politics permeating war because it gives
civilians the right to meddle in operations, while many intellectuals
object to dignifying war as an instrument of policy or an academic
priority. For all these reasons, political science became the main
academic home for the field, and the place of military affairs within
it is periodically challenged.
Within a field of international relations constantly riven by sectarian
debates about overarching frameworks like realism, liberalism, and
their [End Page 8] "neo" variants, the murky boundaries of strategy
fuel controversy. To clarify where strategic studies should fit, think
of a subfield of three concentric circles: at the core is military
science (how technology, organization, and tactics combine to win
battles); the outer, most inclusive ring is security studies
(everything that bears on the safety of a polity); and in the middle
lies strategic studies (how political ends and military means interact
under social, economic, and other constraints).
The distinctions are relevant in principle, because they illustrate why
strategic studies should be the most important part of the
subfield--broader in scope than strictly military problems, but more
focused than security studies, which is potentially boundless. In
practice, however, the distinctions solve few problems because the
dividing lines between strategic studies and the other two layers can
never be clear, and the distinctions are not recognized
institutionally. Only security studies has academic standing, so the
place of strategic studies emerges through debates about defining
security. Most scholars of security identify it with strategic studies,
but much of what they do strikes some in other subfields as too close
to military science for comfort. Critics then argue for reorienting the
security subfield to so many other issues that the military core may
become a pea lost in an amorphous ball of wax. The intellectual
coherence of strategic studies increases with linkage to the military
core, but institutional status and legitimacy grow with distance from
it.
One danger in strategic studies is missing the political forest for the
military trees. That danger was greater during the cold war than now.
The opposite danger--that defining security broadly will squeeze out
work on the military aspects--is greater now. There is no consensus
that attention to military matters remains an important responsibility
for social science, or even that knowledge of military systems is as
vital for studying security as knowledge of economic systems is for
studying political economy.
The Case for Scientific Strategy
The First Cycle of Cold War Strategic Studies
The Second Cycle and After
The Missing Discipline
Strategic Studies and Security Studies
Strategy for What?
Richard K. Betts is Professor of Political Science and Director of the
Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, and he is
Director of National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign
Relations. His most recent book is Military Readiness (1995).
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